Original subtitles

- Welcome to America.

Going out to the desert tomorrow.

That should be a lot of fun, eh?

- Yeah, it will be.

- [Man] If you could step back, you're on camera.

- Oh, okay.

This is your happening and I think a lot of people,

about 300, are gonna be out there.

- Yeah, we got like six buses going down there.

Six buses full of people.

- [Interviewer] And you have a show tonight

at Perkins Palace?

- Yeah, that's right.

- [Interviewer] And you've got two

wildly different environments performing,

are you cautious at all about playing in the desert?

- Cautious?

What does cautious mean?

(ominous music)

(punk rock music)

♪ Break down ♪

♪ Break down ♪

(lyrics muffled)

- In the early 80's, I think the rest of the world

saw LA as this brain dead, sun baked,

smoggy sprawl, which it actually kind of was.

For those of us that grew up here

the early 80's was actually a really vital

and interesting time.

It was a time of experimentation and rebellion.

In 1982, I was 21 years old.

I had dropped out of college and I was working for

a municipal bond broker doing phone sales.

I was very involved in the scene, which was punk rock,

but it was also a lot of really unusual

music and performance.

- I was 19, 20 years old.

I was very much into punk rock

and going to shows all the time.

It felt just natural that it was just a part of our lives

that we would go up to Al's Bar and go to the Anti-Club

and go to the Whiskey to see shows all the time.

- You could go out every night of the week, pretty much,

there was live music, three amazing bands.

Raji's, The Whiskey, the Veil.

Hollywood as a scene was really small.

We knew everybody.

If you went to the Whiskey,

you knew everybody in the Whiskey.

If you went to the Starwood,

you knew everybody in the Starwood.

If you went to the Zero after hours,

you knew all those characters.

- We were very diverse and there were just as many

people of color up in it as there were white kids.

And so bands were multi-cultural

as well as the scene was multi-cultural.

- It didn't matter, nobody cared.

Gay, straight, male, female, skinny, fat,

sober, not sober, it didn't matter.

It was about music and art.

(experimental music)

- And there was a lot of really creative, unusual things

that were going on.

Not all of it was bands.

There was people like Johanna Went.

Johanna Went was a performance artist

who made these amazing costumes

and she would do these transformations

and probably was most notorious

for throwing a severed pig's head into the audience

at the Whiskey A Go-Go.

(punk rock music)

(lyrics muffled)

There was also The Screamers,

who was one of the most celebrated LA punk bands.

They never even put out a record.

They had no guitars.

It was just keyboards and Tomata du Plenty

had this really crazed stage presence that was captivating.

There was one group that really stood out to me.

I'm talking about the Minutemen.

To me they were an LA band that was doing

the really kind of interesting, experimental punk rock

that I appreciated coming out of England.

Bands like Wire that played really fast, concise,

telegraphic songs and the Minutemen

were even more out there.

- [Reporter] It is the individual statement

of a generation of youth expressing their own rebellion

in their own way in terms that most outside their world

don't understand.

- We saw on the 11 o'clock news,

like punk rock shows, slamdancing,

and teenagers being hurt and sent to hospital.

Do you know where your children are tonight?

It was like.

(clapping)

- Punkers have been long at odds with police

and confrontations are not new.

It's our aim to let both sides tell their story

and then let you, the viewer, decide for your own self.

More than 1,000 fans paid $8 each to attend.

Most have gotten inside.

150 others crowded the door, hoping to get inside.

The doors were closed and trouble began.

Youth Brigade was on stage at the time.

Next to them, our producer and cameraman

when the police ordered the shutdown.

- The thing with the LAPD was

you had this really rotten man called Chief Daryl Gates.

Ahh, he was like the Grand Wizard.

- And you know who's feeding and supporting the enemy?

The casual drug user.

- He was creepy and he was definitely racist

and didn't like women and he just didn't like

anybody of color at all.

He didn't like young people.

He didn't like young people having fun.

The police would show up en masse

and you didn't know why, what was going on.

We're at a punk show and seeing the band

and then there's a bunch of police

coming in the door at the Whiskey.

Like, what's up with that?

- Is the punk movement part of the Nazi movement?

- No, it's the police, that's the Nazi movement.

- The police is the Nazi movement?

- [Chuck] Yeah.

- Well the effect of the news media was

that the LAPD freaked out about punk rock,

like it was the second coming of the Black Panthers

and they were just like, they were gonna squash that stuff.

It wasn't gonna get a foothold in their town.

- Sometimes they would come in

and run everybody out of there.

Like with their sticks and stuff.

They just seemed like they were

going through the newspaper and finding band names

that sounded punk rock and trying to make sure they

didn't happen for some reason.

- Police Chief Daryl Gates did not want us there.

We would come out of the Anti Club,

there would be motorcycle cops in riot gear.

I remember my friends coming in from New York,

bands coming in from New York and they couldn't believe

how we didn't jaywalk in Hollywood.

Because we were given tickets, we were thrown in jail.

- I grew up here, I didn't know any better

than living in a militarized police state.

I didn't expect anything else, I wasn't enlightened

that you could live in a non police state.

So you just figured out how to skirt around it.

- We did these little skits where we taunted the police.

(radio static playing)

- [Announcer] Attention all units,

we have a major disturbance at the Stardust Ballroom,

5612 Sunset Boulevard.

- [Announcer] Hey this is unit 47, we got it,

10-four on that.

Hey Frank, is this that Black Flag group again?

- [Announcer] Uh, yeah Joe, 10-four,

Chief Gates is in a real uproar.

- [Announcer] What are we waiting for then?

Let's go beat up some of them damn punk rockers.

- So it was broadcast all over on KROQ.

- Minutemen, Black Flag opening for The Ramones

at the Hollywood Palladium.

After that show, everyone was leaving

and I just remember the police coming out

and just chasing after us.

- It would've been peaceful if they hadn't done anything.

- The police showed no restraint.

The police were used to beating heads.

- The cops always created the riot.

They were definitely the instigators of it.

I was there and I can tell you

there's no way that anybody in the place

did anything to provoke that level of

tactical violence on children.

- I went to see Throbbing Gristle

at the Culver City Veterans Auditorium,

which was a place that never had any kind

of cool stuff going on, whatsoever.

(experimental punk music)

Their whole sonic assault really changed the way

I thought about music and performance forever.

Soon after that, I met the promoter of that show,

Michael Sheppard,

and it was then that the idea of putting on shows

as a form of artistic expression really gelled in my brain.

- So you want to say three then?

Alright, that sounds good, I'll put you down for three.

- Back then, downtown LA was basically

a giant wasteland of abandoned warehouses.

But it was also a place with a lot of opportunity.

There were a few artists living down here.

The rent was cheap.

And some friends and I moved into

an abandoned warehouse called the Nate Starkman Building,

when it was about 25 cents a square foot.

- Downtown LA in the 80's, it was just a huge skid row.

There was nothing but a bunch of winos

hanging out on the sidewalk.

And bars like the Hard Rock Cafe, Jack's,

and the King Edward and all that, marvelous places.

- I knew I didn't want to put on shows in clubs and bars.

I really wanted to find spaces

like downtown warehouse spaces

rehearsal studios by the LA River.

I also thought that by finding these more remote spaces,

I would stay under the radar of the LAPD.

I wanted to have a name for this entity

that would put on these shows.

I hit upon Desolation Center because that's how I was

feeling about my environment at that point in time.

Desolation Center will only run every other weekend.

This gives us the ability to offer quality bands.

We book bands on the basis of raw talent

and/or musical integrity, not drawing power.

Desolation Center is not a profit making venture.

There will be no guest lists.

Everyone but band members and Desolation Center volunteers

must pay to get in.

We do not solicit any press coverage

for Desolation Center events.

We feel that local press coverage in music

has become self serving and upholding of mediocrity.

You'll never see Desolation Center

advertised in the LA Weekly.

The only thing worse than a cop is a fuck-up.

If you have self-destructive tendencies,

please vent them in Hollywood.

Alcohol brings cops.

We refuse to sell drinks to a captive audience

at exorbitant prices.

No dancing required.

We would rather shut down than become a New Wave disco.

When I started putting on my own shows as Desolation Center,

I had cops show up at every event

and I started thinking, I need to apply

some of the out-of-the-box punk rock thinking

that people were using to put out their own records

and start their own zines.

I ended up doing a road trip with some friends

through Mexico, through the Sonoran Desert

and we were listening to people like Wire

and Savage Republic and just looking out the window

at the landscape and it sort of struck me,

like wow, why couldn't we put

this kind of really cool music

into this desert environment.

So the first person I talked to

was Bruce Licher from Savage Republic.

- When Stuart approached me about doing

a desert show I said, oh I've got a location

I think could be really appropriate for this.

I had been doing some filmmaking at UCLA,

some short, experimental films

and I sort of had it in my mind

to create a film that was like Lawrence of Arabia

meets Eraserhead, so I took Stuart out there

to see the location and we both agreed

that it would work really well.

It was beautiful, it was close enough to Los Angeles

that we logistically could do it in a day.

- Then the next person I talked to was D. Boon

from the Minutemen, because I had already done shows,

I was a huge Minutemen fan.

I was like, do you guys wanna play a show in the desert

with Savage Republic?

- We made up a flyer saying here's the show,

send us money if you wanna go to the show.

There really was no show, there was a concept for a show.

And all of a sudden about 170, 166 people

sent us $12, I think then we sat down and said,

how do we do this?

How do you have a show where there's no gate,

where there's no door.

How do you get people there and get them to pay

and even get them there?

- I kind of thought, well, if we include the transportation,

then we have a little bit more control of the situation.

And at the same time, it also lended

a little bit more of a mystery to it

we actually didn't disclose the location.

So people had to kind of trust us,

just get on this bus in downtown LA

and take it all the way out

for a couple hours drive out to the desert.

- One of the main things that I was interested

in doing at that time was creating artwork with a function.

Stuart asked me to make the tickets for Mojave Exodus.

Having this ticket, this object,

made it more real for people.

It was always very prestigious

if Bruce would agree to print up your shindig.

And he was really good at a printing press.

He's like Benjamin Franklin of our scene.

- I remember feeling like I was in Willy Wonka,

and I had gotten the golden ticket.

- It was morning when we got together,

which was unusual because all of the shows

were late at night, so seeing

people in the light of day

was a whole different experience.

Seeing those school buses,

I felt like we were going on a field trip,

like it was a punk rock field trip

and getting on the buses and kind of not really knowing

what it was gonna be like.

- We associate school buses with going to the museum

with your class, but instead you're going out to the desert

and you're gonna see this amazing music.

So the school buses were definitely part

of the whole Desolation Center concept from the beginning.

- I was bus monitor, that was my job.

I didn't know what to expect,

but it became this big responsibility.

The bus drivers had just come from church

so I just announced, everyone, keep your drugs

and your alcohol below the line of the window.

- We all had to go to the bathroom

by the time we hit the truck stop in Ontario.

We all just wanted to go to the bathroom,

but they locked the door on us

and they said, they came on buses, they came on buses,

oh my God!

Dozens and dozens just pouring out of these buses,

the green-haired, leather-jacketed,

strange looking youth of LA out on their day trip.

(ominous music)

- We had a plan as to when people were going to show up,

but I'm out there with my stuff and until I saw a couple

of cars showing up and then these buses on the horizon,

it was like, I was like, okay,

so I guess this is gonna happen.

- We got out of the bus and the lid was off,

it was in the wide open.

Being out in the desert was a really new experience for me.

I was a kid from East LA, I was barely out of high school.

I remember being struck by just how dusty it was

and truly desolate.

That might've been my first time to the desert, actually,

because my parents didn't really take us

on family trips to the desert.

- Not being that far away in Pedro,

we didn't know a lot about the desert.

Me and D. Boon, this was really new for us.

Then we felt kind of stupid

after for not knowing about it and it's California.

- [D. Boon] Here we are in the godforsaken Mojave Desert.

In a fuckin' riverbed.

Let's get into some music.

- So it was blowing really hard,

so hard D. Boon, because he wore contacts,

had to wear sunglasses up really close

and then a headband to try to seal it up

and not let these little grains in,

because it was driving him crazy.

- The wind is blowing into the microphones

and we put socks on them,

I think literally socks.

I had the buses pull up behind the band

and form a windbreak behind the band

and the sound system was going with the wind.

- [Band Member] Are you ready Mister Soundman?

- [Sound Man] Yes sir, band.

- [Band Member] Okay, here we go.

(guitar strumming)

- It wasn't exactly how I had pictured it

because I liked the idea of setting up

and playing with this beautiful backdrop

and here, the audience was looking at the band playing

and the buses were like five feet away.

But you could just turn around

and look in any other direction.

- Once Savage Republic started playing,

the sound was almost bouncing off the desert floor

and I just remember thinking this

was one of the coolest things I'll ever do in my whole life.

(guitar chugging)

- The uniqueness of being in an open space

out in the desert definitely added a magical element.

I know that sounds corny, but it really felt like

we were these young people creating some great

alternative world for ourselves out in the desert.

- There was no violence and no weirdness

everybody was in this one cool group.

- We were really focused and bonded.

It meant a lot to us.

Later on we talk about, what are the things

that all these years together we've done

that's been important and and it really defined

who we were as a couple.

It was transformative.

That desert environment with desert spirits

is awesome for acts of freedom.

- It was just this beautiful, mythical-almost experience.

We didn't make any money on it.

The bands got paid, we paid the sound guy

who brought a generator out.

- It seemed like yeah, we were made to be here.

This gig makes total sense.

And also the idea of the bus, having it all self-contained.

You bring it out, the PA, even though the generator

wasn't big enough, we were on the right track.

But the whole thing where you

could totally make it happen yourself.

It was really beyond the theory, it was made real.

- I really felt a sense of accomplishment,

it was almost like we pulled off a raid

or something like that.

It all worked out.

We got there, the bands played,

everybody got back on the bus.

The buses eventually made it back to LA

and now I need to figure out what other interesting

experiences are possible.

After I did the desert show

with Savage Republic and the Minutemen,

I quit my job and I was backpacking in Europe

and Berlin is where I ended up.

I had a few phone numbers, a few people to look up.

This is the notebook that I had in those days.

It's how I found people's phone numbers

or if I met them I wrote down numbers

and followed up with them.

I had different cities, different countries.

- Berlin in the early 80's,

did feel quite, you could use the term apocalyptic.

It did feel like the end of civilization

could not be that far away.

The early 80's was a time when Cold War was still on.

If there was a nuclear conflict,

you'd be among the first to go, really.

We were in West Berlin, was right within

what was then the Communist part of the world.

- You did have this island feeling

of being surrounded by the East German DDR republic.

You still had bullet holes and the remnants

of World War II on the walls.

There was so much history here,

even though it was a difficult place to be at that time,

I did like it here.

For me, this was an inspiring place to be.

I would stay in squats,

so I felt like even though the environments

were very different, there was a lot of connections

creatively between people doing similar types of music

and art in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The people that were here had a similar sensibility.

It was kind of like, let's not just stop with punk rock,

how can we express these ideas in other ways?

I sort of saw another approach to life

that was less focused on a nine to five job

and more about what you were doing with your life,

so I kind of wanted to keep that going in some way.

Before I came here in Los Angeles,

I had a friend that wrote down Collapsing New Buildings,

go see them.

And then eventually they did play at this club

and it just lived up to everything I had heard

they were just so intense and really different.

(loud punk music)

(chainsaw grinding)

When I saw them I was kind of in awe

of what I'd just seen.

I liked that they were playing metal percussion

and not conventional instruments.

And I thought, I don't know what this would be like

if we took it into the middle of the desert.

And so I just threw it out there,

like hey, maybe this could happen.

(shouting)

Einstürzende Neubauten were in New York

and one of them called me up and said

we're gonna be in Los Angeles in two weeks,

can you do a desert show?

So that was really exciting, a big challenge,

and at the same time, really scary,

because I really didn't know

if I could pull it together that fast

with a bigger band from out of town.

Bruce from Savage Republic,

he and I decided we were gonna scout a new location.

And this was not the most really well thought out process,

but there's a small town way east even of Palm Springs

out in the desert called Mecca.

So we thought, oh it's Mecca, that's so cool.

It's in the middle of the desert and it's Mecca,

we'll go there.

So we drove out there and then we got to a point

where there was a closed road sign

and it went into this canyon.

We thought, well, hey, road's closed, nobody's gonna

come interrupt this show, this'll be great.

An inspiration for the whole idea

of putting on these concerts in the desert

was a Werner Herzog film that I saw at the time

called Fitzcarraldo.

- [Narrator] Fitzcarraldo.

It was a whole epic thing about the Klaus Kinski character

bringing this steamboat through the Amazon,

but the whole idea was he wanted to build

an opera in the jungle.

And by the end of the film,

everything has gone wrong and all he has left is

an opera singer on a boat floating down the Amazon,

but he was thrilled.

He's like, that's my opera in the jungle.

So that was kind of in my mind the whole time,

the idea of this opera in the jungle

but instead it was like industrial music in the desert.

The people from Einstürzende Neubauten reached out

to other people to participate in the show.

And one of the people that they invited

was Mark Pauline from Survival Research Laboratories.

- [Reporter] Work of 30 year old, San Francisco artist

Mark Pauline, reflects the turmoil of the city.

- Mark Pauline invented this whole genre.

He not only made these huge, warlike machines

that are also poetic.

He found these sketchy environments

under freeways to do these shows

and then he dared to have the loudest shows on earth.

- [Reporter] In one experiment with rocket fuel,

Mark Pauline blew off all but one of the fingers

of his own right hand.

(exploding)

- Everything that I found really exciting and challenging

in art and music at the time,

All being here in this remote spot.

It just seemed like, how could it not be awesome?

but at the same time, how many things could go wrong?

- Just want to get away from LA and see Einsturzende again.

I saw them last night.

- [Interviewer] How was the show?

- Oh they almost burned down Perkins Palace.

- [Interviewer] That's good,

the fire marshal going a little nuts.

- Yeah well they lit the fire on stage with gasoline,

ran around on stage with gas and set it on fire.

It was great.

- [Interviewer] You know Mark Pauline has been

added to the show and Boyd Rice has been added to the show.

- That's why we're going.

- Excellent, we're scared.

- [Man] I'm extremely scared.

- [Man] There's no medical service out there

for a couple miles. - [Man] Yeah.

- [Man] Rumor has it he's going to blow up hills.

- Part of the fun of this event to me

was really not knowing where we were going

it was part of the whole secret nature of it.

- And there was no talk of like sunscreen

or bringing water or bringing shade.

Probably most people had leather jackets and their Docs.

And here we all are getting on the bus

to go to the desert without any kind of like, oh

am I going to be comfortable or am I gonna be safe?

- [Man] Nobody's bringing any drugs, are they?

These were full-sized yellow school buses

with the green seats so this was a totally bizarre vibe.

(upbeat music)

- We're vegetarian so we can only eat fries.

- One, two three.

- We hate McDonald's. - We hate McDonald's.

- Me too.

- As the bus kept going and going and going,

it just seemed to get more and more exciting

because we didn't know where we were going

and we didn't know what we were gonna face

once we got there.

I mean, we knew bands were gonna play

but we didn't know how bands were gonna play.

- [Interviewer] When you were leaving Los Angeles

and going out to this location, do you have a--

- I don't even know how I got there.

- Well the buses got to a dirt road

and then the journey continues.

There was that weird sinking feeling

where you're like, we're really isolated here.

(chattering)

- We just showed up at this miraculous place.

People on that bus were carrying firearms

and all kinds of things.

We were free to do whatever we wanted.

- I thought it was a great thing to have it

out in nature with the desert as the backdrop.

It was like you were in your own little universe.

- At first I was like, I don't wanna go out to the desert,

I don't want sun.

I want to go to dark clubs and stuff like that.

It was like, oh God.

But once I got out there I was like,

wow, there's rocks and shit, I can do crazy things!

- In a spot like this, you can reach

a much higher level of concentration

and a much higher level of communication

between the performer and the audience

because there is less distractions.

- We're not gonna be standing on a stage

performing for people.

The whole environment is gonna be our stage

and we're gonna be using that.

(horn blowing)

- We stepped off the bus and there was this stone ridge,

silhouetted against it were percussionists banging away.

(percussion music)

And it was like this strange welcoming committee.

The sound was ringing through the desert.

Wait, did you guys have permits for that?

- [Interviewer] No.

(laughing)

- I just thought it would be really interesting

to do some site specific performance

to create something that was inspired by where we were.

- And we have had a bit of concern about other

performers who are going to be doing things

that may possibly be destructive.

- [Interviewer] Mark Pauline will be performing,

I understand, is that true?

(explosion)

- [Interviewer] Now his performance is thoroughly

destructive in nature.

- I do remember at that time I was working on

my radio controlled tank and I desperately wanted

to bring it along with us and we loaded it

into an Oldsmobile 98.

Mark, Eric, myself and Monte Cazazza

in the Oldsmobile, a tank in the trunk.

We left in the middle of the night at some point.

Going up onto the freeway,

the first sort of bump that we hit,

the car bottomed out and everybody looked at me

like, Matt, we gotta take the tank out of the car.

We're not gonna make it.

We had Werner's 10 barrel 12 gauge shotgun.

We had a lot of materials to make pyrotechnic devices with,

you know, basically bombs.

So we got down there, we just started

looking around to see what we could do.

- When we came down there and we got out to the desert

I was like, well, look at all this fucking garbage

people bring out here.

I said we'll make totem poles with all the garbage

and all the refrigerators, put bombs in all those,

Werner can shoot at the refrigerators and shit.

We'll set bombs up in the mountains.

We'll try to knock a couple rocks down.

- [Interviewer] The people in Djemaa-El-Fina

were hoping that the nature, the environment here

would be left as it was and this is kind of opposed

to that idea, what do you think about that?

- Well first thought that comes to my mind

is that nature, we're part of nature,

and also that nature itself is.

(explosion)

Well, my blood.

- The first bomb we set off

to just let people know the show was starting

was in this cave about 100 yards away from where we were.

And I had put a metal plate over it and it blew up

and I was like damn, that was a big explosion

because it kind of funneled the shockwave out

and I figured that would get everyone's attention.

Well, it also folded this three foot by three foot

sheet of steel in half and sent it flying over the audience

at about 200 miles an hour, spinning like a frisbee

about 10 feet up off the ground.

I looked up and just saw it overhead

and I was like, ugh, okay.

- Something blew up here and then just projectile,

over the crowd and everyone got a bit panicky and terrified.

Some people were just super happy

because it was like, yes, total anarchy,

like create anarchy, make it happen now.

- And then I just asked is everybody okay

and someone said it landed past where everybody was

it was like okay, let's do this show

because we were gonna stop the show

if somebody got cut in half, obviously.

- What he did in the desert was incredible.

That was mind blowing, fantastic.

In Europe, you don't really have the access

to explosives and weapons in the same way Americans do.

(explosions)

- You did not have permits for those spaces

and that was, I think, the most empowering thing about it

and the boldest thing.

- [Announcer] Okay, ladies and gentlemen,

I'm going to make a real important announcement right now

so I'd like everybody's undivided attention.

Just for a moment.

They're gonna blow that side of the mountain away.

- When Mark Pauline was trying to blow up the boulder,

there were some people that were really upset about that

because it was like he's blowing up the desert.

- I was like, oh, you shouldn't be hurting the mountain.

I did feel that way.

But there was another part of me that was like

oh, this is kind of great.

(explosion)

(cheering)

- So it just went bang, but then nothing moved.

- The desert won anyway,

he was never able to blow up the boulder.

So nature beat him in the long run.

- I was kind of hoping to see the hillside

come down on everybody.

But that's my disappointment.

- People in their 20's are sociopaths.

All of them.

If someone did that now, you'd just be on Facebook going,

what a bunch of fucking assholes,

who are these douchebag hipsters,

they have no fucking respect!

And like, yeah, we did that.

We're just like, yeah!

(exploding)

- I immediately understood why they are called

Survival Research Laboratories

and how much the element of danger

and the element of feeling alive are actually connected.

That's an existential thing you learned in West Berlin.

From the times of radical demonstrations

and radical politics, you noticed a connection

between danger and the feeling of being alive.

I understood that immediately.

- [Interviewer] Boyd Rice,

getting ready to perform here real soon,

do you think you're gonna get anything

off the environment here?

- I don't know.

I'm thinking it might be some place it would reflect

a lot of sound but I don't know if it will or not.

- Boyd Rice was one of the most original people

I'd ever met in my life.

Boyd was kind of a wildcard.

Very spontaneous, I don't think he was very

what I would call overcalculating.

- Boyd asked me if would be his assistant

in this fakir-like performance that he was planning to do.

- For a long time I'd thought of doing this thing,

like this old Sufi trick where they have

like a cinder block on your stomach

and somebody smashes it with a sledgehammer.

And I thought, it would be good to open a show that way,

and have somebody smash this thing on my stomach

and then put all the sound over the rhythm.

- There was such a weird sound,

we were like, what is that noise?

and it was like, look, there's mics on the cinder blocks.

- And of course, the eye contact that we had,

because he would signal to me without saying anything,

whether he thought I could hit a little harder

or whether I had reached the intensity

that he can deal with.

- If you totally relax, the cinder block absorbs

most of the impact and you aren't hurt.

- The sun was just going down behind the mountian rocks

and I remember they started the generator.

The incredible noise from Neubauten at that point just hit.

And I was lying in the dirt, like front row,

lying on my stomach in the dirt.

(metal grinding)

- They were giving a pretty hard time

to our Dad's power tools.

They borrowed a chainsaw and a circular saw,

which was fine, I just said don't ruin them,

and they ruined them.

- I'm in construction, I've always done that type of work,

pouring concrete, banging this together

and breaking rocks, whatever, and that stuff really moved me

because it was solid steel grinding,

just real crude shit that really viscerally got you inside.

It was riveting.

How can people say that it's not music?

(grinding)

- I had my set of sticks I would play with

but that got all lost in the sand.

The only possibility for me to make music

or make noise with rocks that we found in the sand

and the metal plate.

You really have to react to what the stones are doing

they fight back and that's a very organic thing.

- Blixa almost seemed like a shaman, you know what I mean,

and there was that feeling of shared experience

and there was that feeling of almost a trance-like state

that you could get into.

- And I just remember Blixa, just staring at me

and shattering these feelings of my Dad or whatever

that came bubbling up.

I'd never been affected like that at a show.

- The fact that people are willing to put this energy

into witnessing what you are doing there

is actually creating a possible environment of reflection.

These people think they see something

but what they see or what they hear is themselves.

- I had been estranged from my parents.

They thought that I had lost my mind or something

so after this Neubauten show I sat down and wrote a letter.

10 pages of the entire experience

and said I'm not the same child that left home.

And this why, and I hope you understand this,

sealed it up and sent it to my mother.

She was just amazed

and she says, that's an incredible story,

that really happened?

I kind of understand now why you love this.

- It was a religious experience.

From someone who rejects all religion,

it was a religious experience.

- After doing two desert shows,

it started to feel a little bit repetitive.

I felt like I needed to something else

to take the Desolation Center concept

and put this music into another environment.

So I started thinking about, what's the opposite of desert?

Water.

So that lead me to think about the Minutemen

because I had already done shows with the Minutemen.

We were friends and I knew that they were

from here in San Pedro and I used to come down

here for backyard parties

where the Minutemen would be playing and on the way back

home up the 110 freeway I would see the cranes and

harbor all lit up at night and it just fascinated me.

I was really interested in this whole area

that was such a big part of Southern California,

but not the cliche of the beach or Hollywood.

I thought, how cool would it be to do a show here?

- First off, just having a Pedro gig,

we were way into it because it was very difficult

in those days for us to play our own town.

We were stopped many times, I can't even tell you

how few gigs we had where we played all the way.

I mean there were some keggers in backyards.

It was really tough for us to play our own town.

There was a lot of friction with people

over these assumptions about what all this stuff was about.

Funny names, funny clothes, funny songs, funny music.

People really took it as threats.

- The Minutemen were a San Pedro band.

They were not an LA punk rock band.

They identified themselves with that city.

San Pedro is a working class town,

these were a bunch of totally down home,

for real, unmannered guys.

(guitar soloing)

- This was the Catalina terminal.

Where these boats are now, it's much smaller.

Right there, that's Princess Cruises.

That's one of their boats in fact.

That's where the Love Boat did their bullshit.

Me and D. Boon, we ran the parking lot there.

This was in the late 70's.

First we worked together at Jack in the Box on Sixth Street,

you pass it on Gaffey.

$1.65 an hour, we did graveyard there, 11 to seven.

D. Boon was sensitive man, an artist man,

a painter with the guitar.

- So when your mothers and fathers create forums

in which your children can learn the beauty of the world

through the arts so they can pass it on to their children.

That's what my parents did for me.

Make Art not Bombs.

- So I took this idea of doing a Minutemen show on a boat

in the harbor to D. Boon, Mike Watt and George

and they were really excited about it.

And they were like, "Hey, we can get the Meat Puppets."

And I was like, wow, that would be amazing.

The Meat Puppets started out as this demented,

chaotic thrash band from Phoenix, Arizona

that had somehow emerged as some of the most

skilled musicians on the scene.

Part of the Desolation Center concept was to

take this music and put it into environments

where you don't usually see music

and really be able to experience

other parts of the landscape in a new way.

The big challenge was, how do you find a boat in the harbor

that's willing to let pack hundreds of punk rockers

onto this boat and take it around the harbor.

Finally I found a whale watch boat out of King Harbor

in Redondo Beach and then I was looking at the boat

like where's the actual stage going to be.

Where's the music going to be performed?

So we had to actually build a stage on the boat

while it was going from Redondo Beach to San Pedro.

- We were hauling ass, basically.

And I'm slapping this stage together.

In my mind I just kept thinking, D. Boon, I was thinking,

it's gotta hold him, it's gotta hold D. Boon.

- I don't think those boat guys knew what was coming.

I don't think they wanted it to happen.

They probably had plenty of weddings on the boat

and they were good with that.

They had never seen someone showing up

with a 1,000 watt tri-amplified sound rig

with four monitors on two mixes

and a 16 channel mixing board.

I just had a lot of stuff.

They stopped us from getting on board in a timely manner.

So we had to do soundcheck

with everybody standing right there.

- Let me hear a beat.

(drums playing)

I must say that I've been

looking forward to this for a long time.

I've never played on a boat before.

- I think for me, probably just because we were on a boat,

and I'm from the desert, it's just kind of like, oh a boat.

I like boats and stuff, but I had never been to

a big harbor like that.

I didn't have any idea so I was getting my eyes opened up

just seeing all those crates stacked up

and all the big cranes.

(punk rock music)

(lyrics muffled)

- That gig was far out, man.

That was absolutely one of the highlights

of my musical career in a lot of ways.

Just magical as crap.

I'm from the fucking desert.

So you get me on a boat in the first place

and we're talking about this thing is kind of wobbly

and I'm getting a little bit queasy

and then it starts chuggling around

the fucking harbor in there

and that was just completely and entirely wonderful.

- When the Meat Puppets started playing,

the stage had a little instability

and they were just kind of bouncing up and down

and the way that the speakers were set for the PA

were doing this and we're like,

oh shit, these things are gonna fall,

either on the audience or into the water or something

and they had to stop the show

and whoever had put it up secured them.

I think they just got some ropes or straps.

And it was like good sailing from there on out.

(lyrics muffled)

- It was really great to be on the boat

moving at night, just cruising the harbor

and listening to rock music.

Just everything about that,

the big cranes to load the tankers.

Just everything down there is kind of weird

and it looks great at night.

- I'm surprised they let you even rent

the charter boat to do that.

- [Interviewer] It was a little touch and go.

- I don't think you can do that these days,

not with Homeland Security and stuff,

they wouldn't let you do it I don't think.

Now you can't even get near the harbor.

We did a lot of gigs and we played a lot of places,

but it's always kind of nice to play in your own hometown

because a lot of people don't really go

beyond their own town.

- And then there we were dancing as the boat cruised

at a good I don't know clip of 10.

Then it would get to the edge

where we were going to go out into the sea.

And it would turn around while the band was playing

and it would come back and it was the Minutemen

and we were all just kind of skankin' on that ship.

- On the 29th we're playing for El Salvador once again.

I hope as many of you people out there can go to that.

- They were from Pedro, but we still kind of

considered them our own here in Los Angeles.

They talked about stuff that nobody talked about in songs.

- Our band could be your life.

Real names be truth.

Me and Mike Watt, we played for years,

punk rock changed our lives.

We learned punk rock up in Hollywood.

Drove up from Pedro.

We were fucking corndogs.

We'd get fucked up and go pogo.

- The Joy at Sea show was in the middle of June 1984.

A lot of what we saw that night

were the songs that became Double Nickels on the Dime

and it was really a peak Minutemen experience.

- That record dropped like a bomb.

They really upped their game.

Double Nickels really said this is an important band.

By the time of Double Nickels on the Dime,

they're taking on all these kind of pre-punk

American rootsy influences,

Dylan and The Band and Creedence Clearwater,

that's sort of coming through.

It was the great underground music of that era.

(lyrics muffled)

- I saw Sonic Youth perform live

at this club called The Loft in Berlin.

I just was like, wow, these guys are so different.

They're playing guitars but the sounds that are coming out

don't sound anything like anything I've heard before.

They were American and I can go walk up to them

after the show and introduce myself.

Hey, if you're ever in LA we should do a desert show.

Michael Sheppard put out a seven inch record,

Death Valley 69, which had Sonic Youth with Lydia Lunch.

- We have a song called Death Valley 69.

It's all about this contemporary reading we were having

of Charles Manson and the Manson Family

and sort of what that meant in the Reagan era.

♪ Now, now, now ♪

♪ Death valley 69 ♪

- Kim Gordon's parents lived in LA.

Kim grew up in LA, so they were visiting,

so we all decided to go drive up to Spahn Ranch.

- We're just like driving dangerously around these cliffs

and smoking weed and seeing the trees

where they carved their names in.

We had a big Manson luncheon that day.

- Things were changing.

Things were getting weirder.

Songs were getting longer and bands were going off

in very different directions.

It was sort of this new thing emerging.

- I think when we started hearing about

what was going on with these gigs in the desert

with Neubauten and Survival Research Laboratories

and Minutemen on the boat.

It just sounded like it was part and parcel

with all this kind of new weird action that was happening.

- I have this great, typed letter from Thurston

from his trip to LA.

It was all about, you're gonna love it out here.

They have all these great burgers

and me and Kim went with the Nip Drivers up to Spahn Ranch

and they were taking some black gel acid,

but not me and Kim.

- And then they came back

to visit Kim's family over Christmas

so we decided since they're gonna be here anyway,

let's do a desert show.

So we picked the first full moon after New Years,

which was January fifth.

The big change for that show was we that decided

after much pressure from a lot of people

that didn't want to ride school buses,

we'd either let them drive themselves or take the bus.

So we actually had both.

What we ended up doing was have people

go to a checkpoint in Victorville

and then they would get a map there

to go the rest of the way.

- Little did I know that going to that map point

would lead me down a path of going to shows

where I needed to go to map points first

for the next 30 or 40 years.

Because I'm still doing that.

- You need to go and get your stamp,

try to get your stamp at the corner.

- Okay.

- Do you have stamps?

- This is so tripendicular.

- One, two, three.

Pass Lucerne Valley and take 247 east,

which is another road, 18 goes south then get on 247 east.

Follow 247 16 more miles

till you see a Desolation Center gila monster sign.

Get on the dirt road.

- Arriving at the desert, the first thing I remember seeing

was the Blue Oyster Cult icon on this stone

overlooking the area which we were gonna play,

which was basically a generator

and a jerry-rigged PA in the sand.

- It was the west coast premiere of Sonic Youth

so we had the Meat Puppets and then Redd Kross

was a favorite of me and a lot of friends at the time

as well as Sonic Youth.

- Redd Kross were just so cute and they were just so funny.

I think it took balls to not be these punk rockers

and to just be these glam kids.

There was a period when punk rock was a staunch thing

and they were into glam and Bowie.

- My roommate at the time was Perry Farrell,

who went on to be Jane's Addiction, and found Lollapalooza.

So Perry was like, we'll open,

and it was hard to turn that down.

- It was before Jane's Addiction started,

so he was this funny guy with the crazy long dreadlocks

in a band called Psi-Com that played at the Anti Club a lot

to only a few people in the room.

- I think if he wasn't helping us

they probably wouldn't have opened up for the shows.

Perry's very funny and very likable

and a very good friend of ours,

but he was a guy who didn't mind certainly

pitching in and helping out.

(punk rock music)

- You let us play for a short time at the bottom there

which was really cool.

I thank you for that.

- People were really sort of in a really good mood

and I didn't really find out until later

that everybody was dosed.

- Some chick I knew brought like 500 hits of acid

and gave it to everybody.

- Sonic Youth playing in the desert on LSD is perfect.

The darkness in the music, we were all feeling.

Like the Reaganomics and the way the government was going.

There was a dark undercurrent in society.

It was there.

It's therapeutic in that weird way

because it releases all whatever weird, negative energy

and then you associate this really beautiful scenarios

with the music.

("Brother James" by Sonic Youth)

♪ Someone knockin' at my door ♪

♪ I don't need 'em anymore ♪

♪ Someone knockin' at my door ♪

- To see Kim, a woman, playing bass.

All of a sudden I just felt like that's what music

should sound like.

And she was just so badass.

She was a big part of that sound.

- Sonic Youth had the most impact on me.

Maybe because it was the most kind of alien at that point.

They're using their guitars in a way

that we had never seen anybody use their guitars before.

- People are like, whoa, what's going on.

At first it was kind of unexpected,

like what the fuck are these guys doing?

And then I just remember slowly,

more and more people gathering around

our little circle of sand where we were playing.

- I thought that was the best time for me

that I'd seen Sonic Youth.

That environment worked really well for them with the music.

- Turn the lights off.

- They just came out and started doing like a space jam.

(jamming music)

I just clicked the lights off.

And it was cool, they just did the whole set

with no lights in the middle of the desert.

- When the lights were turned off

the whole area was illuminated by nothing but the full moon.

And it just creates this otherworldly landscape

and you're hearing this music that's completely psychedelic.

- What a unique opportunity to be able to play out in

the middle of the desert

in the middle of the night in the dark.

There was enhancements involved in the evening, if you will.

We were enhanced.

I was good and fucking enhanced.

- There was very few people that weren't tripping.

- The moon was full, Joshua Trees around,

it was pretty weird.

- You get a bunch of people on LSD together

and you have a group of people that are in

an enlightened state and then that partly drives the music

that's coming out too so it's a give and take.

I was walking around, I was like okay,

I'm seeing this thing.

I think I went around and polled a few dozen people,

do you see this very special thing happening

in the sky, in the air and yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

That was the community fry.

I was tripping, I was just tripping.

- I think the whole crowd was all sort of communally

coming on and there was just one big drunken skinhead guy,

maybe not the brightest bulb in the bunch.

And he just grabbed a hold of the microphone

and he just kept screaming over and over again.

"We're in the desert!"

- We're in the desert!

I see, we're in the desert, you see!

See we're in the desert!

- Wow, I don't remember this at all.

- Full moon, in the desert, the moon is full!

- We played a show in San Francisco

so instead of trying to power out by car,

we flew from San Francisco to Burbank.

So this girl comes and meets us at the airport

and she's in this huge, early 70's big American car

with gigantic anarchy A's in black paint

on the hood and the doors and all this.

And so we're in the Anarchy-mobile,

that's what we dubbed it,

and this girl is just driving like a bat out of heck.

And we obviously had no idea where we were going.

She didn't seem to have any idea where she was going either.

This is what we know.

There's a dirt road somewhere in the Mojave Desert

and two or three miles off this dirt road,

there's this show.

And that's all we know.

- There's no cell phones at this point.

It's not like you can call someone and say hey, we're lost.

We're just lost.

Did anyone even know we were lost?

Would anybody come out looking?

Where would they find us?

We didn't know where we were.

- And we're just lost, completely lost.

Because we just kept taking random dirt roads

and driving in two miles

and then we'd see nothing and we'd drive back out.

- You couldn't see very far,

it was like being lost in a cornfield for crying out loud.

It was pretty scary, we were almost out of gas.

There was no light anywhere except for the car headlights.

- So we're lost for hours

and we're just at the mercy of this girl

just blazing through the desert.

And we see these two cars

and they seem to be driving in tandem.

So we're like, hey, you guys trying to find this thing?

And they're like yeah, we've been driving around for hours.

So we start this little caravan of the three cars.

The Anarchy-mobile runs out of gas.

Apparently the car belonged to her boyfriend

and she just didn't seem to care in the least.

She was completely fine just leaving the car there.

And it might still be there rusting,

two miles off some abandoned dirt road

in the middle of the Mojave Desert for all I know.

We all had to transfer to the other two cars.

And I was really bummed because full-on

we were missing the Meat Puppets, we know at this point.

Let alone like we're on the verge of missing the entire gig.

I ended up curled up in a fetal position

with a barbecue kind of like wedged in between in the middle

and that's how I laid for hours.

- [Announcer] We have an announcement,

just in case you haven't heard.

Redd Kross is going to play next, they are here.

- [Woman] Can the girl who brougth Redd Kross here

come up here?

Caroline or whatever?

You got lost with us?

My acid is in your car, it's an emergency.

- There was no equipment, we had to fight with the

Meat Puppets about playing.

With everyone we found enough amps to perform

- Well we got there, we found out everyone was on acid too.

- Yeah, everyone was on acid

and there was no plans for us to get home.

- [Performer] It's a full moon tonight so.

- [Performer] We're in the desert!

(screaming)

- I mean I was wearing sweats, sweats and a bomber jacket.

- Oh you had sweats on?

- Yeah, I was in sweats.

- The lemon yellow.

- At the time we were a little flashier.

- Yeah, we would never have gone on stage

without our proper stage attire.

And I'm wearing jeans and at that time

I would've never worn jeans on stage

but the night before we were all dolled up

and our clothes were soaking wet.

- [Performer] My pussy's ready for Redd Kross

("Linda Blair" by Redd Kross)

♪ In the exorcist, baby ♪

♪ You were really insane ♪

♪ You got busted, you got dusted ♪

♪ You got busted for cocaine ♪

♪ You're born innocent girl ♪

♪ And that ain't all ♪

♪ You got it for the first time baby in a shower stall ♪

♪ Kidnapped, raped and possessed ♪

♪ Linda is the best ♪

♪ She used to be on the run ♪

♪ But now she thinks it's a lot of fun ♪

♪ She takes her cigarettes from her sleeve ♪

♪ Now she never wants to leave ♪

♪ Not even when she's 18 ♪

- I mean the show was really, really fun.

It was freezing cold, but it was magical.

- We love you and goodnight.

- So many people that became important in our lives

and that remain a part of our circle in LA,

we met them all there.

A lot of those people became friends for

really long periods of our career.

- I don't know how things would've been different

if that desert show never happened.

The fact that it did happen,

it California-ized Sonic Youth like no other gig

would ever have done that.

- After Gila Monster Jamboree, I really felt like

I'd done three desert shows.

They were really cool, it was a really great experience

for the people that were there, the music was amazing.

I'm done, I don't need to do anymore desert shows.

I never really had the idea of like

oh, let's start an annual festival or anything.

It just didn't occur to me.

At that point in time

no one really made money putting on shows

and then I get a letter from the Bureau of Land Management.

Dear Mister Swezey, you have admitted

to Chief Rnager Ken Kleiber on January 13, 1985

that you were responsible for promoting the rock concert.

You also admitted selling 200 tickets to the event.

We have determined trespass damages to be $400.

It kind of freaked me out.

I thought I was doing this secret show

with no permits and all that

and yet the federal government managed to find me.

I just really felt like wow, something has changed here.

I'm on the radar.

We did leave a lot of beer bottles out there.

We didn't do a great job of cleaning up

and I had to come up with this $400,

which at that time seemed like a lot of money.

Then the Minutemen, the Nip Drivers and Lawndale,

played a benefit at the Anti Club.

And we raised enough money to pay off

the Federal government.

By the summer of 1985,

I was completely done promoting shows.

A friend of mine came to me and said

we have grant money from

the National Endowment for the Arts,

would you want to put on a show

with the Swans and Sonic Youth?

On the one hand, I had just finished paying off

the federal government and now I'm getting

a ton more grant money to put on a show with

the coolest bands from New York.

It was sort of an effort to become a little bit more legit.

So that event was called Solstice

and it was sort of a full cycle thing

where we kind of returned back into downtown.

- This was our first West Coast show.

For me that was kind of a pivotal moment

because I'm from LA.

It was a big deal to play there.

(slow heavy music)

The open warehouse and the fact that it wasn't a rock club

was really great.

- Saccharine Trust opening for us were just amazing.

So many nice things about that concert,

the Winter Solstice event, but then there's this cloud.

(ominous music)

- I played out of D. Boon's amp that night.

We didn't have gear and I had an amp

that said Minutemen on the side and it was D. Boon's twin

reverb or whatever it was

and it sounded great and everything.

- I got home from something or other and my sister told me.

And very upset, and she had just heard, and just horrible.

- [Man] It was really tragic.

Lost a friend and a really amazing person and musician,

but also it just felt like things were different.

- It was like the end of an era, definitely,

just knowing the Minutemen would never play again.

- He was such a big part of the heartbeat of that scene.

It was like somebody had just pulled something

so significant out of your body,

and just like now, let's see how you walk.

Very big.

- Mike, George and I obviously,

we'd all lost this important person.

How do you make any sense of that?

- I had to let go of D. Boon at some point.

I couldn't keep thinking about him.

I couldn't even talk about him.

Couldn't even put in the song

until I got enough cajones up.

- When D. Boon died that was like

the end of a lot of things.

- Yeah, it sure was, it was definitely a marker.

It was definitely a marker.

- Like the utopia just started to unravel.

- All the things that had changed by that time

had finally caught up with me.

It wasn't just D. Boon being gone,

but it was the whole way the LA scene had changed.

It kind of made me feel like it was time

to move on to something else.

At that time I was becoming much more interested

in the ideas behind this music

and with a group of like-minded friends

I started Amok Books, a subversive mail order catalog

publishing house and bookstore

that became a communal hub for the L.A. underground.

- L-O-L-L-A-P-A-L-O-O-Z-A.

- Back in the 80's there was a group of heathens

that put on parties in the desert

and we called ourself Desolation Center.

We had cult bands like the Minutemen

and the Meat Puppets and Sonic Youth.

- I can see a connection between Perry

and these Desolation Center shows

to being inspiring enough to get Lollapalooza out of it

because I think he wanted a tribal experience too.

- I definitely learned that to do a show,

to do a festival, what made your shows so unique,

and what made the shows to follow

like the Burning Mans and the Lollapaloozas

and the Coachellas,

you have to concentrate on being a great curator.

- How could you not like going out to the desert

where you feel free?

More people are paying attention to Coachella than ever.

Once it started, it seemed a little more local.

Now Coachella is for the world.

The live streams, whatever, were 84 million or something.

I mean it's become a little more mainstream

but I think society's become a little more mainstream.

People behave more.

- The Desolation Center shows, I had heard of,

from my friends, SRL.

I thought, what a great cool idea, bringing out

these crazy fucking bands and SRL

and doing whatever the fuck you want in the desert.

For me, it was one of the inspirations

when we started doing Burning Man.

- Some of the early Burning Man things

were really anarchic.

A bunch of weirdos out in the desert with guns.

- And it's a drive by shooting, ladies and gentlemen.

- It was about accepting the adversity

of the desert environment and making something

that was more extreme.

Closer to true danger and hazard.

(fire blowing)

- As far as artistic influences on Burning Man,

SRL was by far one of the largest, all of the machine

artists and fire artists in early Burning Man

had apprenticed at SRL.

- The more extremist sort of philosophy

about how to deal with being out there

in the middle of nowhere was really espoused by John Law.

Once he left, it was never the same anymore.

- I never wanted to grow it.

Personally as one of the main organizers

I didn't want to grow, I wanted to let it go organically,

really slow, I didn't want to promote it,

didn't want to push it and one of my other partners

relentlessly grew it any way he possibly could.

- In that moment, I had no idea we were making history.

There was no point of reference to understand

what a historical moment all of that was.

- Part of the magic of Desolation Center shows

and the heart of their mystique is that they faded away

before they had a chance to sell out.

Before they had a chance to become these cash cows.

Right when they're at the precipice of becoming

something huge, they just stop.

- So is that fair that only a few people

went to three desert adventures

or is that amazing that it stayed pure

and never became this thing

with all these expectations attached to it.

It was definitely one of those doors that opens

and you're kind of different on the other side.

I wanted to set something in motion

but I also didn't necessarily feel like

I had to be in control of it all.

It felt like some kind of big group kind of experiment.

- Everybody was safe, everybody was happy,

there was no incidents, no one had to call an ambulance,

and people took care of each other.

- Those shows definitely reflected the feeling of that time

where just having possibilities or having an idea

and just going with it shows that spirit of

yeah, I want to do this, I'm going to make it happen.

(slow punk rock music)

(lyrics drowned out by music)